Table of Contents

How to Use the Find and Recode Function in XERO

Using find and recode

You need the adviser user role to use find and recode.

When you use find and recode you make changes to individual transaction lines, not the entire transaction.

To access find and recode, in the Accounting menu, select Advanced, then click Find and recode.

Common recoding scenarios include, but aren't limited to:

You can search for and recode the following transactions:

Transaction type	Transaction status	Transaction abbreviation
Spend money	Reconciled, unreconciled, and marked as reconciled.	SM
Receive money	Reconciled, unreconciled, and marked as reconciled.	RM
Prepayments (bills and invoices)	Unpaid, paid, reconciled, and unreconciled.	PR
Expense claims	Awaiting payment, paid and archived.	EC
Sales invoices, repeating invoices and credit notes	All - draft, awaiting approval, awaiting payment, and paid.	AR/CR
Purchase bills, repeating bills, bill credit notes	All - draft, awaiting approval, awaiting payment, and paid.	AP/CR
Manual journals	Draft and posted. You can also search for archived journals but you can't recode them.	MJ

You can’t search for or recode the following transactions:

Fixed assets
Purchase orders or quotes
Bank transfers or overpayments
Payroll transactions (including wages, payable bills, payslips, and PDs)
Voided transactions
Any line of a purchase transaction that contains tracked inventory (account type = inventory)

You can recode the source transaction or recode using a manual journal.

Recode the source transaction – shows the correct code on the transaction line. Use this option if you want to recode a contact.
Recode using a manual journal – Xero creates a draft journal to post. The source transaction always shows the original details.
You can search for transaction lines matching or excluding one or more of the following conditions.

Category	Search Conditions
Type	All supported transaction types.
Status	All transactions lines with statuses matching Draft, Awaiting Approval, Awaiting Payment and Paid. When you search for Awaiting Payment transactions the search results will include transaction lines for spend money and receive money.
Account	Can't search accounts receivable, accounts payable, unpaid expense claims, tracking transfers, bank revaluations, unrealised currency gains, bank accounts, fixed assets, tracked inventory accounts or archived accounts.
Bank Account	Select one or more bank accounts that contain the transaction lines.
Reconciled Between	Select a date range to find transaction lines that were reconciled within the two dates.
Date	Transaction lines created on a specific date or within a certain date range. You can't search for transaction lines created prior to a lock date, unless a lock date was set for all users except advisers.
Transaction total	Amounts equal to, less than or more than a specific transaction total.
Tax rate	All active and archived tax rates.
Entered by	User that created the transaction.
Contact	Active contacts, but not archived contacts.
Invoice Number / Reference	The specific invoice number or reference of an invoice or bill.
Tracking	If you've created a tracking category. You can also search for transaction lines that haven't been assigned a tracking category.

We recommend coding no more than 200 transaction lines at a time. Frequent use of find and recode can affect the performance of your Xero organisation and reporting.
To recode more transaction lines using the same query, in the Recode Summary (which displays after you confirm the recode), click this search. The transaction lines you've already recoded won't be displayed in the search results.
When recoding the tax rate, the line total remains the same. The unit amount changes in proportion to the new tax amount.
When you recode an invoice or bill that is generated by a repeating invoice or bill, the template won't be affected by the recode.

Some system accounts can't be recoded. These include accounts receivable, accounts payable, unpaid expense claims, tracking transfers, bank revaluations, unrealised currency gains, bank accounts, fixed assets and tracked inventory.
You can't recode a contact using a manual journal, you need to recode the source transaction.
You can't search for archived contacts.
You're unable to search for, or recode lines on purchase transactions (bills, supplier credit notes and spend money transactions) that use tracked inventory (account type = inventory).
Transactions entered in a foreign currency can only be recoded using the source transaction option.

Do use the above function whenever possible to ease out the process.